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Athole Brose
Upon virgin honeycomb pour the oldest procurable French brandy and the best old Scotch whisky in equal proportions. Allow this mixture to stand for five or six days in a large earthen pipkin in a cool place, strain it, and it is ready for drinking.
A steeped honey liqueur rather than the oatmeal-and-cream drink usually called Atholl Brose. The original gives no quantities at all, so work by proportion and taste.
- ProportionsEqual parts brandy and Scotch, poured over enough honeycomb to submerge it. A workable ratio is about 1 lb of comb to 750 ml of combined spirits, which yields a sweet but still spirituous drink; less comb gives something drier.
- Virgin honeycomb"Virgin" comb is new white wax that has never held brood, the mildest-tasting kind. Cut comb honey from a beekeeper or a good grocer is the modern equivalent; failing that, 8-10 oz of unheated raw honey per bottle of spirits gives the flavour, if not the romance.
- A pipkinAn unglazed or lead-free glazed earthenware pot with a handle. Use a wide-mouthed glass jar instead: easier to seal, and you can see when the wax has risen and the honey dissolved.
- Cool place, not coldA cellar at 50-60F. A refrigerator makes honey sluggish to dissolve and the wax brittle; a warm kitchen is fine but stir daily so the honey does not sit in a layer at the bottom.
- StrainingThe wax will not dissolve. Lift it out, then pass the liquid through a fine sieve lined with muslin, and expect a second filtering to clear the last haze of wax particles. Do not squeeze the cloth or you will push wax through.
- KeepingAt roughly 30-35 percent alcohol by volume the finished brose should keep well for a long time in a stoppered bottle. It will throw a faint deposit over months; decant rather than shake.
- Yield and servingServing -- Serve in small glasses, unchilled, at the end of a meal. Two ounces is a portion.
Atholl Brose belongs to the Perthshire Highlands and takes its second name from brose, the old Scots word for meal steeped in hot liquid; the drink is generally traced by tradition to 1475, when the Earl of Atholl is said to have captured a rebel by filling the well he drank from with honey and whisky. One familiar form is a nourishing one, oatmeal-water strained and mixed with honey, whisky and often cream, drunk at Hogmanay and at Burns suppers. Another is the connoisseur's form, closer to a honey liqueur, and the insistence on "the oldest procurable" brandy alongside the whisky may perhaps be read as a mark of the late-Victorian sideboard, where fine cognac was still assumed to be the better spirit and Scotch the fashionable newcomer. Either way the recipe illustrates a method: extraction by long, cold steeping, with no heat to drive off either alcohol or aroma.